My PC has a 3.5" floppy drive and yes, I do use it. (Retrocomputing hobby.) I use Ubuntu 12.10 with MATE. At every login, the floppy drive lights up and I get the following message box:

The title translates to: It wasn't possible to mount Diskette Disk

Fun fact: If I rmmod floppy and then modprobe floppy while logged in, the same message box appears again.

Also, if I eventually access a floppy disk, the motor won't stop spinning. If I do a mdir of it, after it returns, the motor stops, and then starts again. I suspect there's some process in MATE doing this. My /etc/fstab has nothing related to any removable media, just the root and swap partition.

How do I make MATE stop trying to access the floppy? I repeat, I don't want to disable the floppy. This behavior doesn't happen under CentOS 6 and GNOME 2.x.